How to do Hard Drive Recovery for Free

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By anniewrites
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Hard Drive Recovery

Hard drive recovery can be an important task when you have lost important files on your computer. Perhaps you forgot to save them or your computer crashed. If you're like many in this situation, you can not afford to pay someone to do hard drive recovery for you, and so you need to find help that doesn't dip into your pocket book. Perhaps you've gone searching the net with no luck at all and then landed here. You are in luck because this article will detail the steps to hard drive recovery without paying lots of money for it.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Step 1

Begin the hard drive recovery process by going to the TestDisk Download site. The link is listed in the Resources section below this article. Click on the version you would like to download by choosing your operating system from the list. A window will pop up asking if you'd like to save or open the program. You will want to open and unzip the program, even if you decide to save it to a disk to be used on another computer for hard drive recovery. In order to use this program, you will need to either install an additional hard drive onto your computer or connect your hard drive to a friend's computer. This is because when you are performing hard drive recovery, you can not save files to the hard drive or you risk deleting what you need to recover.
Step 2

At this point in your hard drive recovery process, it is a good idea to check out the TestDisk Step by Step guide, listed in the Resources section below. You will need to decide whether to operate TestDisk from DOS or through Windows. If you can get to Windows, do that. If not, you will need to use DOS.
Step 3

After deciding whether to run Test Drive's free hard drive recovery process in DOS or in Windows, you will need to choose the appropriate command, based on what type of file you are trying to recover. The Step by Step guide will show you the commands to run for various file categories.
Step 4

In order to proceed with your free hard drive recovery, you will now need to create a log and then select the correct hard drive from the list. Next, you will select the partition table and then analyze the partition table status. Take a look at the partition structure to see if anything seems to be missing or damaged.
Step 5

While working with the hard drive recovery software, if anything seems to be missing when you analyze the partition structure, do a Quick Search for partitions. If you need to, you can even do a deep search.
Step 6

Once you have found the correct partition using the hard drive recovery process, you can proceed to partition table recovery, NTFS boot sector recovery, and ultimately recover your important deleted files.
Step 7

If this process does not work, you might also try FINDNTFS or NTFS reader for DOS. If those do not work, you may just have to shell out the big bucks to have a professional perform hard drive recovery.

Comments

deanneorear said

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on 10/15/2009 Great info will save in case I need in future. 5* recmnd

guesswhat said

on 4/17/2009 Great article ....keep up the good work...I gave you 5 Stars and RR on 5 of your articles,very informational...ty ...Please return the favor..Al